Graceless Hearts
by audi katia
Summary: ::modern day AU:: "I can't have this conversation," Bones barks because this is love and it's too much.


_**Notes**: In honor of the newest movie poster being released, I decided to finally post this fic. I wrote it ages ago for the lovely Sheyla's birthday and it has been sitting in my files ever since. What better way to celebrate the "rebirth" of the fandom with a little angst?_

_**Prompt**: "Love is so hard ad there are some things that can't be fixed but you learn that lesson when learning is useless. But I will stand outside of your door in the pouring rain!" - "'Let me help.' A hundred years or so from now, I believe, a famous novelist will write a classic using that theme. He'll recommend these three words even over "I love you."'_

_**Disclaimer**: I own nothing._

* * *

"This isn't working."

He looks up to see her in the doorframe and the kitchen glow behind her lights her up like a silhouette. He does not see the wetness of her eyelashes or the downward curl of her mouth, but instead sees the slump in her darkened shoulders and the wilting line of her spine and the still widened sweep of her hips.

The newspaper (what had he even been reading? he doesn't remember) is slowly folded into his creased and nail-bitten hands, fingers rigidly bent in contrast to her withered curve.

"We didn't deserve this," he reiterates the words of the counselors, her parents, actors on maudlin television series.

Jocelyn leans against the wall as though melting and she's just so damn small. For a split moment, McCoy thinks he can stay and fix her. But she's melting away.

"She looked just like you."

He can't stay. This can't be fixed.

* * *

Here he is, hundreds of miles away from what used to be home. He's got a small apartment and an acceptance letter to finally finish his medical degree.

"Things happen for a reason."

McCoy snorts. That's just something people say to make it through hell.

* * *

All he's got left are his bones.

He tells this to the boy on the barstool next to him and isn't it the fucking funniest joke you ever heard? Jim (is that his name? McCoy doesn't yet know that he will hear this name echoing in his mind for years to come) laughs. Laughs pretty and light and harsh at the same time. It's grating and welcome and irritating all at once and who the fuck does this boy think he is?

_He_ thinks he's wonderful.

McCoy doesn't yet know, but he will think this boy is wonderful someday, too.

* * *

Jim shows up with a bottle of rum and a pirate shanty quick on his lips. McCoy wants to study or rest or do something more responsible, but it's Jim. It's Jim. He's standing in the doorway, silhouetted by the light in the hallway beyond his apartment. He's asking to come in and he's waiting for McCoy to tell him to stay. He's tall and straight and there.

"Bones, please?" It's not really a request. It's a mockery of politeness, but he's still here.

McCoy lets him in.

* * *

It's four in the morning and Jim's sitting in the middle of McCoy's tiny kitchen with a cut of undeterminable origins. He won't say a damn word, but the swelling around his eye convinces McCoy that his friend has been fighting.

Skin has amazing healing abilities, he muses as he knits Jim's skin back together under the harsh kitchen lights. He can see past scars and scraps and wonders the story behind each one. It surprises him that he has not known Jim his entire life.

"I'm not always going to be around to take care of you," he warns, tugging a little tighter than necessary on the stitches. Blood bubbles up in miniscule dots like scattered supernovas, but Jim doesn't even blink.

"Yes you are," he smirks.

McCoy doesn't deny it because, yes. Yes he is.

* * *

Jim steals breakfast right from under McCoy's nose. Jim steals half-hours of study time. Jim steals sips of bourbon. Jim steals glances across the Laundromat. Jim steals the breath from his lungs and the feeling from his extremities.

Jim takes and takes and takes.

But at least he is there to do so.

* * *

McCoy forgets their argument. Forgets his anger, his irritation. Forgets everything but Jim's heat, Jim's scent, Jim's freckles. Fuck this man for making him forget.

His hands settle lightly on Jim's shoulders, too scared to bear down because what if Jim is made of some soft material and the push of his fingers is enough to remold him into something that will leave this room forever? (what if? what if?)

Words he doesn't realize are his decorate the darkened corners of his apartment, suddenly lighting up a spare patch of the cracked wall or the threadbare carpet beneath his angled feet or the frayed sleeve of Jim's jacket that he never hangs up. The words are there, hanging and lighting and barely heard.

"I swear I hated you ten minutes ago."

Jim cracks a smile and McCoy forgets his hands are on Jim's shoulders, forgets his knees are attached to his legs and that his soul is attached to his body. He is a picture falling out of a frame, muscles off of a skeletal system, a feather sweeping from a flying bird.

"Ten minutes ago is a very long time ago," Jim breathes, the words like the rain outside, leaving him cold and so very attuned.

Like rain, he is aware of Jim's words against his skin; like flames, he is engulfed by Jim's everloving mouth on his.

* * *

Jim tells him he just wants to go. To leave. To escape.

He spreads his arms towards the sun and walks without bending his knees, feet flying upwards in elongated steps.

"The going doesn't matter as much as the arriving," McCoy murmurs. "What are you going to?"

Jim doesn't answer. McCoy doesn't expect him to.

* * *

McCoy visits that in-between space of the waking world and unconsciousness, flirting with his dreams and falling deeper into the mattress. His thoughts elude anything concrete, anything more than a wisp of perhaps.

Jim's voice comes from a long way off, anchoring him to the sheets cocooning his body.

"Why aren't you happy?" he asks, and McCoy thinks for a moment that he can feel surprisingly light fingers tracing what he's sure are lines etched deep into his face.

The words are heavy and thick and laced with cotton, but they manage to find their way from the rumbles of his chest and through the slated lines of his teeth.

"Why do you care?"

The feather-light fingers halt on the creases of his nasal labial folds and that should be his cue to smile into Jim's fingertips. But he doesn't. Because Jim is right. Because he isn't happy.

"Of course I care," Jim answers frankly.

But McCoy is still in-between asleep and awake and thinking too hard about his own unhappiness.

(He wakes up and Jim is not there. The unhappiness prevails past dreaming.)

* * *

His first mistake comes right after a kiss.

It's a kiss. It's simple and chaste and nothing but lips touching, a gentle meeting of their mouths. It's soft and pliable and McCoy can't even remember if his hands were on Jim's shoulders or neck or back because he just thinks about those lips on his and he's done. He's absolutely undone.

They pull apart and McCoy can barely see himself reflected in the blown-out blue of Jim's eyes.

Jim's hands pull away from wherever they roamed on McCoy (his shoulders? his neck? his back?) and his body falls in turn, gaze darting across the room.

"Good lay," he says with crass undertones, his eyes suddenly hardened with nonchalance. "Isn't it better when there are no feelings attached?"

* * *

Despite his outstretched arms and his eyes turned to the sun, Jim cannot fly. He cannot leave. He cannot float off into space, closer to the stars he craves and the unlimited nature of the Great Beyond.

He fights. He throws punches and catches kicks and grits his teeth within an inch of his life. He bruises and bleeds and scars like the human he hates himself to be. And when he arrives at McCoy's apartment, he's like an animal, licking at his wounds.

"Let me help," McCoy snaps, too harsh with worry to treat him sweeter.

Jim smiles at some invisible punchline, pushing aside the bandages hanging limp in McCoy's clutched hands.

"Help," he chuckles. Then he presses a hand to his side and McCoy forgets the word in favor of finding a broken rib.

* * *

Jim's mistake comes in the form of a baby's hat found in the drawer when he's ransacking the bedside table for condoms.

"What's this?"

_The end of everything_, he cannot bring himself to say it. Instead, his fingers, surgeon-steady and unwavering, brush the crocheted yellow yarn, and he thinks for a moment he can see projected before him all the Great Perhaps of his life.

Jim doesn't move at all except for the slow motion of returning the hat to the drawer. His hand finds its way to McCoy's hair, stroking and threading and brushing back the tumultuous thoughts across the front of his mind.

"You don't have to say anything," he whispers, his words a salve against the long-worn wounds.

That's it. Right there. That's the moment McCoy falls in love.

* * *

Words ricochet around the apartment, raining down with bitterness and a consequential desire to just go. They are kamikaze pilots and they are aiming for each other.

"We've been doing this for a year!" Jim yells.

In a disconnected, out-of-body experience, McCoy never imagined Jim to be the one to break first. To first acknowledge the nameless something between them. To first contemplate the something more that could be.

"I can't have this conversation," he barks because this is love and it's too much.

Jim slams the door as he leaves and the resounding thwack echoes in McCoy's heart for the rest of his life.

* * *

He ran away from Georgia. He's running away from Jim.

"_The going doesn't matter as much as the arriving. What are you going to?"_

His visit is long overdue.

* * *

The grave is dry as a bone.

Ironic phrase, he thinks without any real humor, for he is wet. Wet with blood still pumping and sweat still dripping and tears still falling.

He places baby's breath and forget-me-nots on the overgrown grass, thinking he'll have to have a word with the groundskeeper because this just is not acceptable at all. The heads of the flowers are still cradled in the thick palms of his hands and it's a bit too much like laying down a baby.

He leaves without speaking at all.

* * *

He comes home from Georgia and thinks about how he once thought he left home from Georgia and isn't it funny what eighteen months can do to a person?

What's funnier, he finds, is what a week can do to two people.

Jim is gone. McCoy has lost him.

Seven days. 168 hours. 10080 minutes. 604800 seconds. Countless heartbeats.

Jim is gone. It's not really funny at all.

* * *

Jim is everywhere.

McCoy pours Jim into his coffee, wipes him from his eyes in the morning, reads his voice in textbooks, sees him on the backs of spiders crawling on the walls. He's everywhere, every thought, every image.

Everywhere.

* * *

(It's two weeks later and four in the morning when Jim comes over because he only ever comes at the most inconvenient times. But he's there. And that's always been his most valued quality.)

Jim scrubs a hand over his face and McCoy hates himself for imagining the feel of the stubble over the tenderness of his palm.

"It's not as though I didn't care at all," Jim swears.

"You just didn't care enough," McCoy finishes.

The ensuing silence confirms everything.

* * *

Nothing is ever final.

McCoy spends his days working at the hospital, simultaneously remembering and forgetting. He thinks about wives and families and heart monitors and rain on the window and yellow hats and stitches and rum and Georgia and freckles and silhouettes.

He thinks of Jim's kisses, Jim's breath on his nose, Jim's hands threaded in his hair. The slick feel of skin on skin, teeth on shoulders. Ribs, knees, the inside of elbows, the corners of impossibly blue eyes.

He remembers saying "Let me help." Remembers how it was stronger than any "I need you," more sincere than any "I love you." (if only they had listened)

He is left emptier than at the start.

* * *

_Please review._


End file.
